Here are some of the themes for the upcoming publishing year of Science Scope. We invite you to share your teaching ideas with your colleagues in the middle-level science community. Visit Manuscript Central to register as an author and submit your article.

November—Developing Critical Consumers of Science

Submission Deadline: June 1, 2013

Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information is science and engineering practice 8 in A Framework for K–12 Science Education. While all three of the abilities in this practice are important to both science and engineering, for this theme we would like to focus more on obtaining and evaluating information than on communicating it. We want you to share your strategies for helping students become critical consumers of science by specifically telling us how you get them to:

• read news articles from various sources and grasp their core meaning.
• view/listen to media information about science and understand what it is saying or how it relates to everyday life or to what has been studied in class.
• evaluate validity of science news items and reports.
• check to see if sources of information have been factchecked or vetted.
• look at claims to see if they are supported by evidence and/or reliable testing.
• read, make sense of and gain information from diagrams and graphics.
• follow directions/procedures from peers/handbooks/etc.

December—Natural Hazards

Submission Deadline: July 1, 2013

Disciplinary Core Idea ESS3 in the K–12 Framework deals with Earth and Human Impact and has component idea ESS3.B which focuses on natural hazards. What combination of cross cutting concepts and science/engineering practices do you use to help students understand the Earth processes underlying earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, floods, coastal erosion, wildfires, dust storms, drought, landslides, and avalanches? Do you have an engaging engineering design project to enhance your activity? How do you capitalize on local and regional events to demonstrate the effects of natural hazards on the lives of individuals as well as society? What strategies do you use to engage students in learning about the role of science, technology, and engineering in predicting and preparing for natural disasters? Share lessons that lead students to understand how “human activity can contribute to the frequency and intensity of some natural hazards” and realize that the steps taken to reduce the impacts of natural disasters can have both positive and negative consequences.

January—Using Multiple Modes of Expression to Demonstrate Understanding

Submission Deadline: August 1, 2013

The K–12 Framework expresses the concern that traditional tests cannot accurately measure what students have learned and goes on to advocate this: “In order to help ensure educational equity, specific strategies need to be employed to guard against unintended and undesirable assessment-based underestimations of student understanding.” This is followed by a clear recommendation that students be allowed to “demonstrate competence through multiple means of expression and in multiple contexts.”

What does the implementation of this recommendation—against the use of a one-size-fits-all assessment approach—look like in your classroom? Do you feel you have the tools and know-how to do what is advocated in these statements? Share your best tips for involving technology and collaboration in assessment tasks. Tell us how you utilize methods such as interviews with students, portfolios, individual and group reports, online postings, presentations, notebooks, models, diagrams, lab practical exams, and student self-assessment in your classroom. How do you design formative and summative tasks that are culturally sensitive and accessible to English language learners yet demand higher order thinking, assess conceptual understanding, and provide reliable evidence of learning? How do you align your classroom-based assessment tasks, prompts, and scenarios with learning goals and with district, state, and national standards? Share your tips for efficiently reading assessments and providing timely, useful feedback to students.

Upcoming Themes:

General Interest Manuscripts
Submission Deadline: Ongoing
Manuscripts of general interest, not targeted to a specific theme, are published in every issue of Science Scope

Guest Editorial
Submission Deadline: Ongoing
Guest editorials of approximately 750 words on any middle level science education topic can be submitted at any time.

Letters to the Editor
Submission Deadline: Ongoing
Have you used an activity published in Science Scope in the last year, or liked—r disliked—something you read in the journal? We welcome your comments and feedback at any time.

Tried and True
Submission Deadline: Ongoing
Do you have an activity that has withstood the test of time, one that deserves a place in any collection of lab classics? Perhaps you have been doing it so long that you have forgotten where you originally found it, or you have changed it so much that it hardly resembles the original. Tell us what makes the activity worth keeping. Is it the never-fail excitement it generates with students? Is it the clarity with which it teaches a concept? Is it the ease with which it develops valued lab or process skills? What special ingredients or twists do you add to make the classic version even better?

Teacher’s Toolkit
Submission Deadline: Ongoing
In this column, you can share your how-to instructional strategies, practical advice, and classroom applicable results of action research with fellow middle level teachers. Tell us how you efficiently navigate today’s vast quantity of resources and websites to craft new lesson plans or to redesign/update older lessons to improve student achievement. What research-based practices do you use to guide your teaching? What are you doing to become familiar with the K–12 Framework for Science Education and prepare for the Next Generation Science Standards?